Adventures in Local Marketing BrightLocal

Local SEOs have a love-hate relationship with link building.

We love links, but building them is time-consuming, manual, repetitive and ultimately has a relatively low success rate compared to other SEO tactics.

Fortunately, Dani Owens is here to help. Dani has a wealth of experience building local links for a wide variety of clients and niches. In this episode, she reveals:

• The differences between link building for local SEO versus traditional SEO
• Her simple three step process to ensure campaign success
• The biggest local link building no-nos
• Low-effort link building tactics that any business can implement
• Creative link building tactics that your competitors won’t be able to replicate

Growing an agency is hard. There are so many things to get right and so many things that can go wrong.

Growth isn’t as simple as getting new clients on the books–and that’s not exactly simple anyway. You also need to focus on client retention, hiring and training staff, managing team workloads, creating efficient processes, and building and nurturing a winning culture–all while keeping a watchful eye on profitability.

On this episode, we chatted to Blake Denman about his first-hand experience of growing his agency, RicketyRoo. He’ll guide us through his successes and missteps as he’s scaled RicketyRoo to a team of ten.

You’ll learn:

• Why choosing a niche is key to growth
• Why agency owners need to ruthlessly prioritize their time
• How Blake uses partners and relationships to drive leads
• Why digital marketing conferences were terrible for lead generation
• When to hire and how to get it right

We like to think of ourselves as rational people–our decisions are based on logic and facts. But the truth is that we’re all guided by biases that influence the way we think and act.

Being aware of these biases can be extremely powerful in the hands of a marketer. After all, the very practice of marketing is to influence people’s behaviours–whether that’s encouraging someone to buy a product or simply to open an email.

In this episode, Phill Agnew, host of marketing science podcast, Nudge, explains the seven consumer psychology principles that will make your marketing more effective.

You’ll learn:

• How a simple tactic made people 82% more likely to complete a loyalty card
• How Steve Jobs used anchoring to send the crowd into a frenzy at the iPad launch event
• How KFC sold more fries by limiting the number that customers could buy
• How negative social proof caused more people to fossilized ancient wood at a national park
• How a 73-year-old marketing campaign changed the way we buy engagement rings, forever!

This episode is packed with plenty of practical examples that prove the power of consumer psychology. In fact, we’d be very surprised if you don’t come away with at least one new tactic that you’ll want to implement right away.

Adventures in Local Marketing is back for a second season!

Throughout season two, we're going to be branching out to cover a broad range of topics to truly help you become a better local marketer.

Amanda Jordan is our first guest of the season, and we have been lucky enough to hear her valuable insights on the local SEO issues of multi-location businesses. This is a topic we haven't had the opportunity to explore in-depth before, so it was great to sit down with Amanda and listen to her advice.

Having worked in the industry for over ten years, Amanda has a great deal of first-hand SEO experience with multi-location businesses. As you'll learn, these businesses face unique challenges with local SEO, but a powerful strategy can combat these problems.

Listen to learn:

• How to avoid duplicate content issues with unique local landing pages
• Why citations still play an important role
• The importance of competitor research
• The challenges of managing Google Business Profile at scale
• How to educate stakeholders and get buy-in

Is your Google My Business listing sending out strong trust signals?

That’s the question Levi Williams-Clucas, SEO Specialist at StrategiQ, aims to answer in this episode of Adventures in Local Marketing.

Levi views trust signals as a double-header. There are the trust signals your GMB listing gives out to potential customers – would someone buy from your business?

And, there are the trust signals it sends out to Google – does your business seem legitimate and worthy of ranking?

Listen to learn:

• Which Google My Business features send out trust signals
• What negatively impacts trust within GMB
• How to optimize your website to strengthen trust signals
• The top 5 tactics that help you build and maintain trust signals

On this episode, we chatted with Colan Nielsen about how to build an effective, and importantly, unique local SEO playbook.

Colan is VP of Local Search at Sterling Sky, and we tapped into his 11+ years of experience to find out the best ways to develop your own playbook.

As you’ll learn, a playbook goes way beyond a simple checklist of actions to take. Your playbook should not only define how you go about local SEO, but also what steps you take to communicate with clients and uncover new tactics.

Listen to learn:

• The big benefits of having a playbook
• The pitfalls to avoid when using a playbook
• How to use your playbook through the first year of working with a client
• How to continue to expand and sharpen your playbook